Verisign, Thawte or GeoTrust?

[kevinj]

I have a site that I'm setting up a secure shopping cart system on and need to order the secure server certificate. I've always used Verisign but they are the most expensive. GeoTrust is the cheapest of the three. Has anyone used GeoTrust before? Anything I should be aware of with them?

Thanks.

[txbakers]

The price difference is SIGNIFICANT. So different that I called GeoTrust to ask why. His answer was:

"We're buying the business. A certificate is a certificate."

[shady]

I use geotrust and have found no problems. At the end of the day, so long as the "little padlock" shows, the customer couldn't care less who provided it!

[The Contractor]

I will echo what Shady stated :)

[kevinj]

Thanks for the replies. I'm all ready to go with GeoTrust but I noticed on GeoTrust's site that it says compatible with 98% of browsers. I didn't see a list of incompatible browsers, but it makes me wonder what they're talking about. Anyone have any input?

[The Contractor]

I believe they may be talking about old versions of Netscape. I read about this at one time in one of their FAQs. I downloaded an old version of Netscape and it prompts you to manually "Install" the certificate when going to the site with the GeoTrust certificate. It then works flawlessly. The way I see it anyone that uses a very old version of a browser knows it's quirks :)

[kevinj]

Thanks Contractor. That makes sense. I'm going to give GeoTrust a try. Saving over $200 a certificate seems reason enough to give it a go.

[wingslevel]

I'm with Shady, but we used comodo - they give you 30 days free and you can be up in about 20 minutes. I had major customer service problems with thawte and switched.

[lgn]

We use Thawte. However Verisign is the most trusted ( in the consumers eyes) certificate.

Since Verisign owns Thawte. We modified the certificate image to say Thawte 'A Verisign Company'.

That way we get the Verisign branding, but pay Thawte prices.

[Mersh]

We actually saved a lot of money by buying our Geotrust Cert through www.rackshack.net. Only $49 there.

[zuiko]

For what it's worth I got the $15 from freessl.com (which is GeoTrust) and it does technically work, but it warns any users that the certificate is not from a trusted root, so what good is it?

If I wanted that I could've just made the certificate myself.

[CHC]

The Geotrust @ $49 from RackShack is the deal to go for. Although most consumers have'nt heard of Geotrust they have certainly heard of Equifax, which is what the cert is branded as when users right click on secured pages.

I did a quick straw poll of some non-techy end users recently. I was very surprised by this but actually found that more of them had heard of (and therefore trusted) Equifax than Verisign.

[caine]

I currently use thwarte certs, though verisign's as has been mentioned is the most trusted. but if you do go away from the main two. There are loads of sites that do Good E-Comm practicies certification, as in a reciprocal link from yours to theirs, in which their site is an online version of their publications, hence they are trusted by the public, due to the focus of there paper publications.